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How To Help Improve, Develop Mesa Drivers

08-07-2012, 12:20 PM

Phoronix: How To Help Improve, Develop Mesa Drivers

If you aren't satisfied with seeing Mesa lag far behind the latest OpenGL standard and come up short when in the areas of performance and features compared to some of the proprietary graphics drivers, they always welcome additional help...

Are any non devs here running mesa from git? Are the build instructions up to date (http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Building)? I mean would I get it compiled on a vanilla Fedra 17 / Ubuntu 12.4 installation? Are there eventually scripts available (fetch and build) for the lazy ones?

Comment

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
cd mesa
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64 --with-gallium-drivers="<drivername>"
make -jX
make install (<-- this will overwrite your packages installed by your package manager, in case you want to use the result system wide)

you may have to adjust the "--libdir" parameter and more config arguments are available to enable (experimental) features (see ./autogen.sh --help).

Comment

Me.
OK, I understand C language but I'm (sadly) incompetent to improve the drivers. That said, the R600Todo lists some "Easy" tasks, I think this is very interesting that experimented devs push more "Easy" tasks here so that we can at least try to understand the code with a point of entry. This is much more easy!

Are the build instructions up to date (http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Building)? I mean would I get it compiled on a vanilla Fedra 17 / Ubuntu 12.4 installation? Are there eventually scripts available (fetch and build) for the lazy ones?

It looks mostly obsolete.
In fact, this is very simple to compile a git driver. I wrote a tutorial (in french) in a Fedora-fr forum, I can translate it if someone wants.

Comment

Btw Michael is compiling them regularly. How about a step by step article (maybe to draw enough attention to get the official wiki updated at least)?

In this this tutorial you will build the r600g driver (you can build other drivers too) so that you can use the upstream (git) driver without touching the Fedora driver. The compiled driver will be used only when you want. You can build the 64-bit driver for a 64-bit system, or the 32-bit driver for a 32-bit driver, and even a 32-bit driver for a 64-bit system (this is what you need in order to play 32-bit games like the awesone Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars!!).

You must have in mind that I'm using Fedora 17 x86-64.
Also, currently, don't use the 3.5 kernel since there is some problem with r600g and it. Stay on the 3.4.6 for now.